It has long been recognized that the structure of traditional educational institutions is not conducive to optimizing the quality of the teaching and the learning that take place in them. This is particularly true of elementary, junior and senior high school education (grades K-12), both public and private, but is also true even with regard to higher education, vocational schools, home schooling, and job training within corporations.
One of the main reasons for this is that in traditional educational institutions, students having multiple skill and knowledge levels are grouped together in classes, and are taught large amounts of curricular material over large stretches of time (a semester, quarter or even a complete school year). In this structure, students advance from one level to another within the educational institution without mastering sufficient amounts of the curriculum. Their advancement is based upon a “passing grade,” which is an average grade across a fairly large number of individual topics and which often is a fairly low grade, such as a C, that does not indicate any real mastery of the curriculum being taught. Moreover, students can have below C grades in several individual topics, and still end up with an average passing grade. As a result, most students over time develop serious gaps in mastery of the knowledge base that the curriculum represents.
In traditional educational institutions, many of the students grouped together in the same class are often unprepared to learn the topic at hand, because of the large number of gaps they have accumulated in their knowledge repertoire. This is a major problem for teachers, who are compelled to teach to multiple levels of students at the same time. To handle this, teachers sometimes try to subdivide their classroom into smaller groups, but this is generally an inadequate solution, since it means the teacher cannot focus on the entire class at once. In any event, even subdividing into groups will not necessarily put all the students within a group at the same skill or knowledge mastery level.
The large size of the classes (often 30 students or more) is another reason why the teaching and learning in most traditional educational institutions is far from optimum. There are different estimates as to what the ideal class size is, both for the teacher and the students, but few would deny that an average class size of 15 is better than 30. Yet, within the current structure of most educational institutions, the only way to reduce the average class size is to hire more teachers, or to allow fewer students into the school, neither of which is typically a realistic option for budgetary or political reasons.
An additional reason why teaching and learning in most traditional educational institutions is far from optimum is that the curriculum units are too large. It is generally recognized that some parts of the curriculum are more important than others, and should be given greater emphasis and reviewed more often. However, in traditional educational institutions, almost all curriculum units are spread over equally large blocks of time, sometimes whole semesters or quarters, and teachers often have little flexibility to focus on and emphasize the core skills and units of knowledge. They are forced to go on to new material in order to fill in the term adequately. Moreover, because of the relatively rigid structure of the school curriculum, once a topic has been taught, it is more often than not seldom taken up again, preventing substantive review and a deepening of the students' knowledge of the core subjects and skills.
Another flaw in the structure of traditional educational institutions is the way in which both teachers and students are assigned to their classes. The assignment is generally done based upon subject, grade or year level, with limited regard to factors that may affect many of the students' ability to learn (such as prior successful or unsuccessful experience with a particular teacher) or the teachers' readiness to teach (such as a strong interest or lack of interest in teaching a particular subject or topic). It is well known that rapport between teachers and students is an important factor in the quality of education, and that certain students do better with certain teachers rather than others. It is also well known that teachers do a better job when they teach topics they prefer to teach. Yet, traditional educational institutions do not take these factors sufficiently into account when assigning students and teachers to classes. Most educational institutions do not maintain any records correlating student success with particular teachers, and even were they able to maintain such records, existing scheduling software, the rigid curriculum structure, and the large sizes of the classes make it difficult to use such information effectively for the benefit of the students and the teachers.
Because of their rigid structure, most traditional educational institutions do not allow for the possibility of students proceeding individually through the typical semester-long curriculum, e.g., at substantially varying rates. In high schools, for example, students are compelled to generally cover all the material designated as the minimum curricular content for each grade level. This may work reasonably well for the “average” student in a particular subject, but affords little room for accommodation both for the more intelligent and/or more motivated students on the one hand, and the slower and/or less motivated students on the other hand. All students, regardless of ability and motivation, are generally grouped together in classes of varying sizes, and are required to cover large quantities of curricular material at the same time and at the same pace. Although some schools group students into “tracks” (“more advanced” or “less advanced”) for placement in classes, these groupings are generally fairly crude, and generally also comprise students having different skill and knowledge levels. As a consequence, the better students are often not able to reach their full learning potential, and the slower students are not accorded the special attention that they need.
The structure of traditional educational institutions has also contributed to the unhealthy phenomenon of “social promotions,” especially in elementary and secondary schools, whereby students who have not mastered even the core curriculum of one grade level are allowed to “pass” and move on to the next higher grade level. This practice merely deepens the difficulties facing teachers who are compelled to teach large numbers of students grouped together in their classes having multiple skill and knowledge levels, and who are not capable of learning the same material at the same pace.
Social promotions occur even in educational institutions such as colleges, graduate schools, trade schools, university extension programs and job training classes, where grade levels per se are not used. Nevertheless, some general type of representation of a student's place or level in these schools or programs is often used, e.g., in a college the student may be described as a freshman, sophomore, junior or senior; in a medical or law school the student may be a 1st, 2nd, 3rd, or 4th year student; and in a certification program for professional training, the student's level may be described by how advanced a certificate he is trying to achieve and where he is in the program. The social promotions that occur in these institutions may not be as egregious as those in elementary or high schools, but are nevertheless quite prevalent—students continue to move upwards through the course of study with many specific gaps in their knowledge base. This occurs not only because students advance based upon an overall passing grade, but also because they may miss classes due to illness or other necessities of life, they may have poor rapport with a particular teacher, or they may fail to master material for a variety of other reasons. “Getting by” often becomes the norm, and even students who excel in general may not master key components of a specific course. (In general herein, the term “grade level” is intended to encompass any type of “educational level” such as described above.)
Various solutions have been proposed to rectify the numerous defects in the structure of traditional educational institutions. Chief among these has been to abandon or partially replace the traditional school/classroom structure in favor of individual instruction, made possible by the advent of the personal computer and the possibility of “computer assisted instruction.” A vast industry has developed in recent years providing individualized computer-based courses of instruction in many different subjects, such as mathematics, foreign languages and the like. However, not all curricular subjects lend themselves well to this type of instructional format. In addition, individualized, computer-based instruction cannot provide important elements of the educational process which are provided by the traditional structure of educational institutions, not the least of which are the personal impact and role modeling of a really good teacher, and the socializing impact of the school room and the school campus. Moreover, for political, social and economic reasons, it is simply not possible to completely abandon the traditional educational structure based upon group learning in a classroom in favor of an educational process that is based totally on individual learning and computer-assisted instruction.
More recently, online “virtual classroom” education has become available, which utilizes email lists, high-speed video links and various interactive tools (such as having a class “vote” on a particular issue through a computer, or permitting a teacher to present and draw directly onto an electronic slide-show presentation). However, online classes are typically dependent upon access to computers with Internet connections (which sometimes must also be high-speed Internet connections) for each student. They are therefore relatively expensive, and require substantial infrastructure. For this reason, they are generally not available to populations in the third world and are still not universally available even in more developed countries. Online classes have other disadvantages, such as less direct personal contact with teachers, and, generally speaking, more limited socialization experiences with fellow students. Human person-to-person feedback is an essential part of the educational process, and even high-end online classes (which involve high-speed video links) cannot fully provide such feedback. Online education may try to emphasize human interaction through chat rooms and similar technologies, but cannot fully replace the pedagogical benefits of direct human contact.
Consortiums such as the IMS Project, or the Instructional Management Systems Learning Consortium, (www.imsproject.com) have been created for promoting common standards for distributing online learning activities, tracking learner progress, reporting learner performance, and exchanging student records between administrative systems. The learning management systems IMS supports are able to keep track of student education plans, schedule courses (including instructors and resources), enroll people in courses, record course results, and update student academic progress. Similarly, companies such as Saba (www.saba.com) and SmartForce (www.smartforce.com) offer products such as Saba's Learning Enterprise product and SmartForce's e-Learning platform, which are learning management systems that dynamically track and administer students' progress. These systems are focused most heavily on online learning and therefore have the limitations described above (e.g., high speed video online technology is generally limited to marketing to corporations because of its expense). Some of these learning management systems also promote instructor-based learning and mentoring. Other Web sites describing services for computer education and computer-facilitated education are www.blackboard.com, www.click2learn.com, www.intelliprep.com, and www.skillscape.com.
Various school administration software programs are commercially available, such as those marketed by SchedulExpert, Inc. (Ithaca, N.Y.), Rediker Software, Inc. (Hampden, Mass.), and Pentamation Enterprises, Inc. (Bethlehem, Pa.). According to the information displayed on the websites of these companies (www.schedulexpert.com; www.rediker.com; and www.pentamation.com), all of these programs, in one form or another, enable school administrators and teachers to maintain a computerized database of students, keep daily attendance records and records of grades, and produce report cards and various other reports. They also describe various scheduling tools.
ScheduleExpert is described as providing a tool for automated course scheduling in post-secondary educational institutions, being able to assign a course to a specific room, to one set of rooms, only to rooms that have particular features or attributes, or to rooms within a specific building or within a specified walking distance of the course's ideal location. ScheduleExpert is further described as being able to identify the schedule that best satisfies user-specified relative importance of six performance criteria, including avoiding conflicts of classes, ideal number of teaching days for faculty, preferred class times for faculty, faculty desire for consecutive classes, and minimizing distance from an ideal building.
Pentamation is described as an interactive software package designed to automatically schedule courses into class periods while assigning them to teachers and rooms based upon possible meeting codes and suitable allocation of resources.
Rediker is described as producing a schedule of classes either in an automatic mode or an interactive mode. The school administrator enters the courses taught in the school, the courses each student must take, the number of sections (up to three) any one course will have, optionally assigns a teacher to each section and optionally indicates any periods in which each section should not meet. In automatic mode, the program will tell the administrator when each section should meet so that there will be the fewest number of conflicts. In interactive mode, the program informs the administrator which periods would be best for a given course or section and when the teacher is available, the administrator selects the period, and then the program and the administrator proceed to select the other courses in turn.
Eagle Rock School and Professional Development Center in Estes Park, Colo. carries out several educational practices that exemplify a trend seen in a small number of schools across the country. As described by Lois E. Easton (“If Standards Are Absolute . . . ”, Education Week, Apr. 12, 2000, pages 50, 52-53), these include the advancement of students based on competencies and not on grade level; varied student pathways through individualized learning plans; the possibility of a “class” taking place not only in the classroom, but at other sites such as a pharmacy or a fish pier; students traveling all over the world via the World Wide Web to get the information they need; different styles of learning for different students; and varying assessment techniques.
The book “Designs for Science Literary” by Project 2061 of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (F. James Rutherford, Director Emeritus, Project 2061), published by Oxford University Press, which is incorporated herein by reference, describes systems for flexible curricula assembly.
Kumon Math and Reading Centers are described on the World Wide Web (www.kumon.com) as providing a method of learning which includes individualized instruction in which a student advances according to individual ability rather than age or grade level, a curriculum in math and reading which presents concepts in small increments, and development of mastery of skills through repeated practice.
In an article entitled “New Features for Learning Management System,” (ALN Magazine, Volume 3, Issue 2, December, 1999, www.aln.org), which is incorporated herein by reference, Bruce A. McHenry discusses spontaneous group formation of students and teachers to help them in online learning environments. McHenry writes: “Students' paths through the content, determined by their questions and satisfaction with the answers, will serve to identify cohorts of like minded students and the teachers that help them. These patterns of association will be also become factors for the Q&A finding function previously based on distance (feature 1) and semantics (feature 2). Perhaps more importantly, the associations will help to identify groups of individuals who can move through the material at about the same pace. On-line study sessions could then be scheduled in order to foster live group discussion and private conversations among these individuals.”
U.S. Pat. No. 5,864,869 to Doak et al., describes a computerized method for use by teachers, for creating, editing and maintaining generic and subject-specific lesson plans, grade sheets and other information and reports. Teachers input in advance of the school term, which is up to a year in length, the total number of pages of text to be covered during the term in each subject they will be teaching. The software accesses pertinent information about the school calendar, and allocates the number of pages or percentages of the teaching tasks for each day. At the end of each week, the teachers input the number of text pages completed or the percentage of the tasks that were completed, and the computer prints out the next week's lesson plans, after reallocating the remaining pages of texts or tasks to fit the time remaining in the term for completion of the tasks.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,904,485 to Siefert, describes a system for computer-assisted instruction of a school's curriculum to individual students, enabling the students to learn the material at home. A learning profile is established and maintained for each student, which indicates the student's capabilities, preferred learning style, and standing. Based upon the profile, the software selects appropriate material for presentation to the student during each learning session. The program assesses whether the student has mastered the material. If he has not mastered the material, it is presented to him in a different way. If repeated different presentations of the material fail to instill mastery, a video conference is established between the student and a teacher.
Each of these patents is incorporated herein by reference.